Vegetables play a crucial role in mitigating metabolic disorders. However, no studies have investigated the potential mediating role of vegetable intake in

We began our study in 2020 to understand cooperation during COVID-19. As the pandemic evolved, so did our questions. Five years of panel data eventually gave us an unexpected opportunity to explore the roots of vaccine conspiracy beliefs.

As demand for therapy surges beyond metros, start-ups, hospitals, and investors are working to transform mental healthcare from an awareness movement into a sustainable segment.

When deciding whether to cooperate with someone, we may consider both their reputation and how they have treated us personally. We built a model that does the same—and found that this combination can make cooperation remarkably robust in an imperfect world.

The Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study (MTRAS) has been a source of enduring controversy due to its goal of addressing genetic and environmental explanations of Black-White IQ differences. The study followed the intellectual development of 130 Black and interracial children adopted into relatively advantaged White households. However, contrary to the initial interpretations of its original researchers, MTRAS became a tool for hereditarian racial ideologies. Its findings were appropriated and publicized by figures associated with racist research agendas, such as J. Philippe Rushton. We contend that the design of MTRAS was never capable of achieving its most ambitious scientific aims and, as a result, unintentionally contributed to a body of speculative literature that leveraged its inconclusive findings to support harmful discriminatory ideologies. To the extent that MTRAS was both limited in scientific value and potentially harmful, this paper examines the question: was MTRAS abhorrent race science?

I present an ontology of criteria for evaluating theory to answer the titular question from the perspective of a scientist practitioner. Set inside a formal account of our adjudication over theories, a metatheoretical calculus, this ontology comprises the following: (a) metaphysical commitment, the need to highlight what parts of theory are not under investigation, but are assumed, asserted, or essential; (b) discursive survival, the ability to be understood by interested non-bad actors, to withstand scrutiny within the intended (sub)field(s), and to negotiate the dialectical landscape thereof; (c) empirical interface, the potential to explicate the relationship between theory and observation, i.e., how observations relate to, and affect, theory and vice versa; (d) minimising harm, the reckoning with how theory is forged in a fire of historical, if not ongoing, abuses—from past crimes against humanity, to current exploitation, turbocharged or hyped by machine learning, to historical and present internal academic marginalisation. This work hopes to serve as a possible beginning for scientists who want to examine the properties and characteristics of theories, to propose additional virtues and vices, and to engage in further dialogue. Finally, I appeal to practitioners to iterate frequently over such criteria, by building and sharing the metatheoretical calculi used to adjudicate over theories.

The city of Leipzig in Germany conducts large-scale school surveys of adolescents in secondary schools. While in 2010 and 2015 girls were somewhat less satisfied than boys, in 2023 this gender gap had doubled. Why? When asking such a reverse causal question, answers often focus on broad narratives, such as the psychological impact of social media. Here, we illustrate how to probe alternative explanations, such as demographic changes and methodological issues. First, we rule out that the observed pattern is a simple scaling artifact. Second, we find that the widening of the gender gap is much more pronounced among students with a migration background. This could plausibly be explained by a shift in the composition of the underlying population, with a strong increase in the proportion of Syrian students, and a relative decrease of Vietnamese students. Third, part of the increasing gender gap could potentially be attributed to survey mode: In 2023, for the first time, the survey was conducted on tablets—and unexpectedly, girls (but not boys) reported significantly lower satisfaction when surveyed on tablet rather than on paper. Lastly, beyond these patterns, we still find significantly widening gender gaps in satisfaction with leisure time activities and relationships to friends. Thus, there may be a substantive increase in the gender gap in satisfaction in those two domains that is not readily attributable to changes in demographics and survey mode.

Social interaction is argued to play a crucial role for grounding abstract knowledge, yet empirical evidence is scarce. To investigate whether social interaction affects the processing of abstract words, 60 French speakers semantically categorized the degree of socialness and concreteness of words either individually or in dyads. When judging the socialness of words, dyads showed a processing advantage for abstract social words that was absent in individual performance. In contrast, when judging the concreteness of words, dyads were less accurate for abstract social words than individuals, confirming that social interaction renders these words more concrete. Dividing the dyads by their level of social engagement based on gaze patterns revealed that the effects were driven by the more cooperative dyads. The findings demonstrate that language processing is distinct between interactive and isolated contexts, where social interaction and engagement dynamically shape the interpretation of abstract concepts.

Khvostov et al. (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 32: 2903–2912, 2025) present compelling evidence that observers have explicit access to detailed ensemble feature distributions, challenging the traditional view that only summary statistics are available. Here, we demonstrate that the Target Confusability Competition (TCC) ensemble model (Robinson & Brady, Nature Human Behaviour, 7: 1638–1651, 2023) provides a straightforward process-level account of these results. Without any parameter tuning, the model accurately predicts the observed response patterns across Gaussian, uniform, and bimodal color distributions. This alignment underscores the utility of TCC-ensemble in explaining ensemble perception and highlights the value of similarity-based encoding and integration mechanisms in supporting access to distributional structure.

The focus of attention (FoA) is a resource within working memory (WM) assumed to hold limited information in a highly accessible state. Recent evidence suggests the FoA can flexibly adjust to hold early, middle, or terminal memory representations in a highly active state with adequate motivation. When a high-reward item is present, the FoA can be redirected to flexibly adjust and select prioritized items, leading to improved performance. This has been termed the prioritization effect. This finding has been demonstrated across prior investigations that have consistently used the color red to indicate the high-reward stimulus. The salience of the stimulus may alternatively explain the prioritization effect in that the salient item may have an easier time entering WM. Salience could influence memory performance through better encoding. The current study aims to test the effect of feature-based confounds (pop-out effect) on reward-based prioritization by using a probe-recognition task and alternating the color of the to-be-prioritized item. Four colors (red, green, blue, magenta) were used, and the color assigned to a higher point-value was randomized between subjects. Our results showed that the prioritization effect was still evident even when salience (pop-out) was controlled. Regardless of the color used there was a performance benefit for the prioritized list position. Comparisons with prior studies indicate that visual pop-out, while not necessary for prioritization, may help facilitate stronger reward effects. Raw trial-level data, statistical analysis, and task code are available in the Open Science Framework (OSF) repository ( https://bit.ly/4whbh1q ). The experiment was not preregistered.

Although mental disorder categories were originally developed to explain and predict human psychology and behavior, in certain cases, namely, in cases involving animal caregiving and welfare, these categories have been extended to animal minds. This is in tension with the views of the majority of the scientific community, which tend towards skepticism about the utilization of mental health categories in non-human cases. This paper considers the feasibility of applying mental disorder categories to animals, and explores why different fields have drawn different conclusions on the matter. Using a comparison between human obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) and animal stereotypic behavior, and drawing on literature in psychiatry, philosophy of science, animal models, and philosophy of disability, I explore the various considerations relevant to whether and how mental disorders can be attributed to cases of abnormal animal behavior.